title: Cell Line Data Base: structure and recent improvements towards molecular authentication of human cell lines.
abstract: The Cell Line Data Base (CLDB) is a well-known reference information source on human and animal cell lines including information on more than 6000 cell lines. Main biological features are coded according to controlled vocabularies derived from international lists and taxonomies. HyperCLDB (http://bioinformatics.istge.it/hypercldb/) is a hypertext version of CLDB that improves data accessibility by also allowing information retrieval through web spiders. Access to HyperCLDB is provided through indexes of biological characteristics and navigation in the hypertext is granted by many internal links. HyperCLDB also includes links to external resources. Recently, an interest was raised for a reference nomenclature for cell lines and CLDB was seen as an authoritative system. Furthermore, to overcome the cell line misidentification problem, molecular authentication methods, such as fingerprinting, single-locus short tandem repeat (STR) profile and single nucleotide polymorphisms validation, were proposed. Since this data is distributed, a reference portal on authentication of human cell lines is needed. We present here the architecture and contents of CLDB, its recent enhancements and perspectives. We also present a new related database, the Cell Line Integrated Molecular Authentication (CLIMA) database (http://bioinformatics.istge.it/clima/), that allows to link authentication data to actual cell lines.
authors.affiliation: Bioinformatics, Cell Bank, National Cancer Research Institute and IEIIT, National Research Council, Genova, Italy. paolo.romano@istge.it
authors.forename: Paolo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Romano
authors.forename: Assunta
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Manniello
authors.forename: Ottavia
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Aresu
authors.forename: Massimiliano
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Armento
authors.forename: Michela
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Cesaro
authors.forename: Barbara
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Parodi
mesh_terms: D002460:Cell Line; D016208:Databases, Factual; D006801:Humans; D018895:Microsatellite Repeats; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled